The field of this invention is hyperlink park and search (HPS). More specifically, when the cursor parks on a hyperlink, behind the scene the computer automatically visits the link and performs a range of desired operations, such as:
Searches for a set of strings that the user has inputted and displays on the current viewing screen whether or not there are matches. Stores all displayed data in the computer. Edits and displays stored data in between parks. Searches for pre-defined song information that the user has inputted and when it identifies a match, downloads and plays a media data file using a media player on the current viewing computer.
Indicates on the current viewing screen if any of the parked-on hyperlinks cannot be linked to and/or displayed.
Rates the hyperlinked page that the cursor is parked on without leaving the current viewing page.
Every web site usually has a main web page that has at least one hyperlink to its inner page or other Uniform Resource Locators (URLs). Email texts often also contain hyperlinks. When one uses the Yahoo! search engine, for example, a number of URLs show up on the results page. When one reads a description of a URL and clicks on it, sometimes one finds that the page cannot be displayed, or the link is to a page one has already visited. Currently, when one clicks on a hyperlink and a new web page is displayed, from the Edit menu one can select Find (on This Page). When the Find dialog is displayed, one can input search string (s) into the textbox with the label Find What. One can click Find Next in the Find dialog to conduct a search on the newly displayed page. Then one clicks back to the previous web page to view other hyperlinks, clicks on those hyperlinks to display the web pages linked to by them, and then repeats the process of using Edit on the browser's menu bar. This process is tedious and error prone at best. This invention removes the forward and backward web page navigation from the user browsing experience and allows the user to devote more time and attention to searching for the information he/she really needs.
Currently, unlike this invention, none of the existing browser technologies, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape, has the function of parking on the hyperlink, searching in the background, displaying the searched results, and storing the searched results without leaving the current viewing computer screen. This invention therefore can help cut down unwanted browsing time by showing the results of multiple-string searches on parked-on hyperlinks on the current viewing computer screen. The user can select and store a portion of each searched result. This invention provides a method of showing the strings matching percentage of the web page—it is named Web Page Text Rating Index (WPTRI). This index gives an objective rating of a specific web page based on predefined criteria provided by the user.
For example, when one parks the cursor on a particular text hyperlink or a picture hyperlink, the browser status bar, title bar, or tool-tip-text will display: “This page cannot be displayed -->http://www.cannotdisplay.com” if the page cannot be displayed. If the search strings were “dog” and “cat,” the display may read: “{dog} has -->3, {cat} has -->0, -->http://www.pethouse.com.” Or the display may read: “Free dog examination, How to give your dog a bath, $50 for a mixed-breed dog -->http://www.pethouse.com.” In the case of WPTRI, when browsing a web page, the status bar, title bar, or tool-tip-text will display a rating result such as: “This page is travel-related; its rating index is 35%.” Thirty-five percent is the strings matching percentage. “Travel-related” is determined by matching the strings from different subject areas such as travel, law, medicine, etc. In this case, the most strings matched were travel-related. When the subject of travel is detected, it uses its sub-subjects to calculate the strings matching percentage. The higher the percentage, the better the travel content. The strings contained in the sub-subjects of “travel” for instance, can be requested from travel associations. The user may add to or modify the sub-subjects if he or she chooses to do so.
For example, in the Microsoft Explorer status bar, it will display: “This page is travel-related, its rating index is 35%,” “Thailand has 5 out of 10 matches, Europe has 12 out of 20 matches, Japan has 6 out of 7 matches,” etc. “Thailand has 5 out of matches” means that this web page contains five of the ten points of interest agreed on by the local travel association that provides the sub-subjects. This reduces the possibility of visiting web pages with exaggerated advertising or pages with much form but little substance. WPTRI is indifferent to web page layout, the color scheme of the web page, grammar, and other stylistic aspects of the web pages. It provides neutrality to the commercially-tilted search results (so-called “sponsored matches”) seen on most search engines today.
The rating of a page can be achieved visually or for instance by U.S. Pat. No. 5,996,011, entitled “System and method for filtering data received by a computer system,” issued on Nov. 30, 1999 to Donald Creig Humes, which filters objectionable words at the moment the computer receives the data. Another example is Platform for Internet Content Selection (PICS). The way PICS works is when the user requests to browse a URL, the filter software sends that URL to a label bureau requesting a description label of that URL, and that software will then decide based on the label received whether or not to reject connection to the URL. U.S. Pat. No. 6,266,664, entitled “Method for scanning, analyzing and rating digital information content,” issued on Jul. 24, 2001 to Adrian Peter Russell-Falla and Andrew Bard Hanson weighs each filtered word on a web page and disallows connection to the URL if the words exceed a total threshold rating. U.S. Pat. No. 6,389,472, entitled “Method and system for identifying and locating inappropriate content” issued on May 14, 2002 to Patrick Alan Hughes and Paul Blair Elswick uses the strings in the proxy server to search the received data and disallows connection to the URL when the data is unwanted.
Chen's invention uses a Web Page Text Rating Index (WPTRI). The WPTRI is calculated by using rating subjects and sub-subjects from a predefined list to search web pages and then dividing the number of matches by the total number of strings in the sub-subjects and multiplying that number by 100. Rating methods vary.
The embodiment of Chen's invention uses, for example, the following Microsoft web products and technologies: Microsoft Office XP software including Excel VBA, Access VBA, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Access database, and Excel database; Microsoft SQL database software; Visual Basic 6.0; Visual Basic.Net; Microsoft Visual C++; C# programming language; Microsoft Windows Application Programming Interface; Microsoft Advance Server 2000; Windows CE; and Microsoft Visual Studio.Net. Other examples include Linux operation software, UNIX and PHP programming language, MySQL database, and Oracle database software. In Chen's invention, the client-side user computer can be a personal computer, a web pad, a tablet PC, a mobile PC, a PDA, a mobile phone with PDA, a Microsoft Smart Display, or an interactive digital TV. The computer link to the Internet can be wired or wireless. The input device used to input search strings in this invention can be a keyboard, a handwriting input device or a voice recognition device.